30 March 2008

I feel sick. I've been feeling sick for a week now. It started on Easter Monday and hasn't let up. I took two days off work last week and spent them lying in bed moaning and miserable. I also spent most of this weekend doing the same. It's a sore throat kind of thing that has been going around town combined with a head cold, so I can't swallow, I can't think and my muscles are starting to ache from being in bed so much.

25 March 2008

One should always be drunk.That's all that matters; that's our one imperative need.So as not to feel Time's horrible burden which breaks your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing.But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue as you choose.But get drunk.And if, at some time, on the steps of a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the bleak solitude of your room, you are waking and the drunkenness has already abated,ask the wind, the wave, the stars, the clock, all that which flees, all that which groans, all that which rolls, all that which sings, all that which speaks, ask them what time it is;and the wind, the wave, the stars, the birds and the clock will reply:"It is time to get drunk!"So that you may not be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk, get drunk and never pause for rest!With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose!

Apparently Baudelaire was high on opium most of the time, so what would he know?

11 March 2008

How do you rhyme 'smile' with 'hour'? Imagine for a moment that you're a song writer and you are trying to think of a word to rhyme with 'smile'. I don't think 'hour' would be among the first few dozen words that spring to mind. But although it's a bad rhyme, Neil Diamond pulls it off in one of my favourite karaoke songs, 'Cracklin' Rose':

Cracklin' Rosie make me smile.Girl if it lasts for an hour,Well that's all right,'cos we've got all night.

Maybe it's his Brooklyn accent, I don't know, but to me it seems to work just fine.

Most bad rhymes grate on my nerves every time I hear them. The Steve Miller Band are probably the worst offenders. These four lines from 'Take The Money And Run' are all supposed to rhyme but none of them do:

Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas.You know he knows just exactly what the facts is.He ain't gonna let those two escape justice.He makes his living off of the people's taxes.

"What the facts is??" That's just stupid. But that's not all. They also had a hit with 'Abra-cadabra':

Abra abra-cadabra.I'm gonna reach out and grab ya.

It grates, I tell you. So does the Vincent Price monologue at the end of Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'. Remember this was spoken, rather than sung:

Creatures crawl in search of blood,To terrorize your neighbourhood.

It's not Vincent Price's fault. There is no way that anybody could make that work. Then there's Adrian Gurvitz's classic hit 'Gonna Write A Classic':

Gonna write a classic.Gonna write it in an attic.Babe I'm an addict.

I never heard the rest of that song because I couldn't make it past the first three lines. It's just so infuriating.

Songwriters take note: Taking words that almost rhyme but don't really and putting them together as if they do, while hoping we won't notice is not clever, and it's not poetic license. It's just annoying, so stop it. Don't ever try to rhyme 'tonight' with 'life' or 'rise' because you can't, although somehow Creedence Clearwater Revival managed to score a hit with this:

Don't go out tonight,'cos it's bound to take your life.There's a bad moon on the rhyme (oops, I mean rise).